Colored Women's Clubs Research Articles

“Why Sit Ye Here and Die”? Counterhegemonic Histories of the Black Female Intellectual in Nineteenth-Century America

This paper examines the work and lives of black female activist intellectuals in the years before the formation of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACWC) in 1896. Looking deeper at arguments originally made by Maria Stewart concerning the denial of black women's ambitions and limiting potential in their working lives, the analysis employs the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, in particular his notion of the intellectual, to help reflect on the centrality of these black women in the development of an early counterhegemonic movement.

Benevolence, Moral Reform, Equality: Women's Activism in Kansas City, 1870 to 1940 by K. David Hanzlick

Reviewed by: Benevolence, Moral Reform, Equality: Women's Activism in Kansas City, 1870 to 1940 by K. David Hanzlick Sara Egge K. David Hanzlick, Benevolence, Moral Reform, Equality: Women's Activism in Kansas City, 1870 to 1940. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2018. 316 pp. $50.00 (cloth). K. David Hanzlick examines how women in Kansas City claimed the public sphere and became political agents between 1870 and 1940 in his book Benevolence, Moral Reform, Equality. As the title suggests, these women did so by organizing for charity, agitating to combat evils in society, and campaigning for political rights like suffrage. While they approached this tripartite process in ways that resembled their eastern counterparts' strategies, Kansas City's women diverged in how they engaged in this activism. Hanzlick argues that Kansas City's location at the intersection of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers and along the border of one slave and one free state helped its development as a western commercial metropolis and fueled a potent political mix. Business and agricultural promise lured people to a place rife with simmering sectional antagonisms. It was this context that made unification among reformers paramount. It also encouraged women to build public reputations as reformers and leaders in their community. [End Page 190] Civic engagement and shared desire for economic growth healed divisions and established bonds of loyalty. Along with an introduction and conclusion, the book contains five chapters that detail the civic engagement that politicized women and earned them public reputations. Hanzlick's reliance upon newspapers, census records, city directories, and other primary sources in Kansas City–based archives to tell his story allows him to delve deeply into the details. Hanzlick follows "consistent Kansas Citians" and newcomers; the latter typically hailed from the northeast, came from Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish religious backgrounds, and supported economic development amid dense social networks. Chapter 2 explains how many of these upper-class women joined a single relief agency, the Women's Christian Association (WCA), in the 1870s. While benevolence to the poor seemed the primary focus of the WCA, Hanzlick notes that members pursued a variety of reform activities to end other social ills like prostitution and to secure the right to vote. Over time, the membership became increasingly elite and focused solely on benevolence until a general relief agency, led by men, appeared in 1880. Kansas City's male leaders adopted an ambivalent approach to the poor from 1880 to World War I in the wake of dramatic population growth and unfettered corporate capitalism in the city. The regional hub attracted transient workers, and disagreements emerged about how to contend with such a large population of poor people. Hanzlick places these debates in a broader context in which reformers wrestled with questions about individual or structural blame. In chapter 3, he examines the male-led Board of Public Welfare, a Progressive-Era entity begun in 1910, telling the story of how these reformers struggled to discard notions that character building, rather than major structural change, was the key to eliminating poverty. Chapter 4 takes up the narrative from chapter 2, locating reform in a variety of local chapters of national organizations like the Women's Christian Temperance Union, General Federation of Women's Clubs, National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, Young Women's Christian Association, and Catholic Ladies' Aid Society. While these groups embraced similar reforms—such as prohibition, woman suffrage, and consent laws—they worked separately. Chapter 5 carries the narrative to the eve of World War II, finding that unlike the divisions that plagued women at the national level, women in Kansas City remained united. They sought political participation in local governance by supporting campaigns for municipal reform, engaging in party politics, and running for local offi ce. [End Page 191] Benevolence, Moral Reform, Equality not only successfully traces the history of women's activism in Kansas City, but it also speaks to histories of social welfare and municipal reform that included men. Some chapters, like chapter 3, pursue questions about the development of midwestern metropolitanism more so than women's activism. Hanzlick also rightly argues that his work opens doors to further investigations and that scholars should treat his...

“The most unprotected of all human beings”: Black Girls, State Violence, and the Limits of Protection in Jim Crow Virginia

This article examines the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls (VISCG), the state’s only reformatory for delinquent black girls, which was established by the Virginia State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs in 1915. Rather than punishing them for their adolescent misbehaviors, the founding organization intended to protect troubled black girls from inappropriate incarceration with adults and other state practices of violence and negligence. The founders also intended to prepare these girls for a discriminatory labor market by providing specialized training in the domestic arts and carefully supervised domestic parole placements. A closer look at the practice of domestic parole complicates the neat distinctions between education and incarceration, protection and punishment that the women of the Virginia State Federation made in their public discourse about the school. Instead of special protection, girls committed to the VISCG from courts across the state experienced vulnerability to violence, isolation, and exploitation at the hands of white employers during domestic parole placements. This article argues that the VISCG’s practice of domestic parole, despite the best intentions of school leadership, constituted a mode of carceral violence that warrants more interrogation.

African Americans in Omaha and the 1898 Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition

Previous articleNext article No AccessAfrican Americans in Omaha and the 1898 Trans-Mississippi and International ExpositionDavid J. PeavlerDavid J. Peavler Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 93, Number 3Summer 2008 A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/JAAHv93n3p337 Views: 34Total views on this site Copyright ASALHPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Bein' Womanish: Womanist Efforts in Child Saving During the Progressive Era

This article highlights the establishment by the Alabama Federation of Colored Women's Clubs in 1907 of Alabama's first and only reform school for African American youths, the Mt. Meigs Reformatory for Juvenile Negro Lawbreakers. Recognizing that the issues of African American women and the larger African American community were inextricably linked, courageous 19th-century African American women worked within a womanist ideological framework and harnessed their resources to develop purposeful agendas and creative responses to pressing problems in the African American community. Sorely neglected, this legacy begs for the attention of scholars who recognize the value of unearthing historical fragments to create enriched wholes.

The Political Development of Female Civic Engagement in Postwar America

Past research has identified several factors that help explain what happened to civic engagement after World War II, but it has not adequately explained how these factors mattered to particular groups of citizens defined by gender, race, or class. This essay reexamines the dominant account of postwar civic decline by highlighting the relational nature of political change and the processes through which social groups transform. It explores the development of three women's associations: the General Federation of Women's Clubs (GFWC), National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACWC), and Woman's Division of Christian Service (WDCS) (predecessor of the United Methodist Women). A variety of postwar changes—in the realities of women's lives, the appearance of new social movement organizations, and the formation of the United Nations, for example—pressured the GFWC, NACWC, and WDCS to adopt new organizational methods that blurred civic–political distinctions. Postwar women's associations experimented with the structures, strategies, and identities now common to modern-day interest groups, providing a critical foundation for a new politics of gender that would emerge in the 1960s. If these reinvented and ascendant organizations were more attuned to emerging political opportunities, however, they also translated into less active and less inclusive forms of participation.The author would like to thank Kristi Andersen, Elisabeth Clemens, McGee Young, Kathleen Laughlin, and the editors and anonymous reviewers from Politics & Gender for their thoughtful contributions to this manuscript. Draft sections of this essay were presented at 2004 annual meetings of the American Political Science Association, the Journal of Policy History, and the Social Science History Association.

Southern Ladies, New Women: Race, Region, and Clubwomen in South Carolina, 1890–1930

Joan Marie Johnson has brought a new angle of vision to bear on southern women of the early twentieth century. While historians such as Anne Firor Scott, Elizabeth Hayes Turner, and Marsha Wedell have explored women's organizations in southern cities, Johnson uses clubwomen within the towns and cities of South Carolina as a laboratory for focusing on the construction and meanings of southern identity for white and African American women. What emerges is a dual history of two parallel yet separate umbrella groups, the state's Federation of Women's Clubs (SCFWC) and its African American counterpart, the Federation of Colored Women's Clubs (scfcwc). To be sure, both groups of clubwomen came from elite backgrounds and showed a literary bent—they read books and presented reports. Yet Johnson's exploration emphasizes the differences in their identity and group experiences. Claiming that white elite women saw their southern identity linked to the Lost Cause, the author stresses the overlapping membership of white women's clubs and the local chapters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Here her primary examples are Louisa and Mary Poppenheim, wealthy Vassar-educated sisters in Charleston who belonged to both organizations.

"Maintaining a Home for Girls": The Iowa Federation of Colored Women's Clubs at the University of Iowa, 1919-1950

This essay examines the Iowa Federation of Colored Women's Clubs (IFCWC) campaign to operate a house for African American women at the University of Iowa from 1919 to 1950. (1) It seeks to add to a growing body of literature which focuses on African American philanthropy and collective black economic enterprises. An examination of the experiences of African American women at the University of Iowa and the IFCWC Home campaign offers an interesting case study that builds on recent research work on African American Women's philanthropy. (2) The IFCWC's economic enterprise developed because between 1913 and 1946, the University of Iowa barred African American students from campus and some student activities. The experiences of African American women at the University of Iowa are unique for two reasons: 1) the house they occupied was one of a few dormitories in the nation owned and operated by a formally organized group of African American women; and 2) the campaign to maintain the IFCWC Hom e provided mostly middle-class African American women students with the organizational, intellectual, and leadership skills necessary to become the next generation of black women activists. In general, the experiences of African American college women at predominantly white coeducational institutions in the early twentieth century are unique because white women often had the guidance and support of white women administrators and/or faculty. (3) African American women, on the other hand, had to look outside the university for such mentors and role models. The question remains then, how did the alliance with the IFCWC help to keep students connected to the African American community; and how did the community respond? How did limited employment prospects that resulted from race and gender prejudice help to bring about a sharply focused movement to make a college education available to a number of Iowa's young African American women? I contend that the IFCWC prepared African American women at the University of I owa to assume positions of leadership in organizations such as the IFCWC, National Association of Colored Women (NACW), the Order of the Eastern Star (OES), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and a host of other local and regional civil rights organizations. (4) Upon graduation, these women also assumed responsibilities in their local communities in their effort to the race. This work places African American women's lives at the center of inquiry in a preexisting historiographical paradigm which often excludes them through a preoccupation with African American men and white women. A few scholars, such as Linda Perkins, Elizabeth Ihle, Jeanne Noble, and Ellen Lawson, have completed various studies on African American women's higher education. Other scholars, such as Amy Thompson McCandless, offer thorough and insightful comparisons of the southern white and southern black women's education in the twentieth century. Outside the works by this small group of historians, the experiences of college educated African American women have been marginal. Particularly missing from current studies is any examination of African American women in the midwest. (5) Although African American women's historiography has recently focused on Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, these works avoid any elaborate discussions of African American women's history in midwestern states west of the Mississippi River su ch as Minnesota, Nebraska, and Iowa. (6) To be sure, this study is not only specific to Iowa, but to African American women who attended the University of Iowa. I contend that racism did not paralyze these women's struggle for equality. They transformed their experiences with racism into a call for social activism, racial uplift, and service to their communities. (7) As Kevin Gaines, Stephanie Shaw and other scholars point out, although African Americans agreed on the ideal of uplift they did not always agree on what types of behavior were appropriate. …

Sowing Seeds of Kindness--and Change: A History of the Iowa Association of Colored Women's Clubs

Sowing Seeds of Kindness--and Change: A History of the Iowa Association of Colored Women's Clubs

My Life and an Era The Autobiography of Buck Colbert Franklin (review)

My Life and an Era The Autobiography of Buck Colbert Eranklin Edited by John Hope Franklin and John Whittington Franklin Louisiana State University Press, 1997 288 pp. Cloth, $29.95 Here is a powerful story that transcends mere description of the author's era. It probes deeply the moral and philosophical aspects of cultural relationships among various peoples, the responsibility of government to ensure safety and justice, and what it means to be human in a supposedly democratic society built upon a Judeo-Christian ethic. Buck Colbert Franklin's autobiography joins those of Ada Lois Sipuel, who integrated the Oklahoma University law school in 1948, civil rights activist Clara Luper, and novelist Ralph Ellison in offering its insight into the role black Oklahomans played in the formation of the state and in social reform. Born in 1879 to David and Milley Franklin, Buck Colbert Franklin lived to witness the emergence of Oklahoma from its territorial stage to statehood. For over five decades he watched carefully the events that led to entrenched segregation and, ultimately, to its fall with the 1954 Brown decision. Although he never completed his college work, young Franklin attended Roger Williams College in Nashville and Atlanta Baptist College (now Morehouse College) before returning to Oklahoma where he passed the bar. As an attorney and active community member with national contacts, Franklin occupied a strategic position from which to observe state and national history as it unfolded. He met the great and near-great within the African American society of his time, and his story strengthens and authenticates much of what we know about the plight of African Americans. This autobiography, though, is more than a thoughtful commentary on heritage and the challenges to black existence in a society that limited opportunities and access to political, social, and economic power. The author's discussion of the family values that characterized his upbringing tells us much about the inner life of the black community and other institutional structures in Oklahoma during his era. Although close to his mother, a teacher who was part Choctaw, Franklin enjoyed an even stronger tie to his father, who died during the young man's college years. One senses the closeness between father and son as David Franklin tries to shelter his offspring from the harshness of discrimination and when he protects him from frontier dangers as the two make a long journey from southern Oklahoma to what is now the western part of the state. Later, Buck Colbert Franklin shows the same devotion to his four children -- B. C. Jr., Mozzella, Anne, and John Hope. The author's wife, Mollie, played a central role in his life and in the black community. Readers interested in women's history will profit from the attention Franklin has given his spouse and her activities. A community-minded person, Mollie Parker Franklin created the first day nursery for black children in Tulsa, after the family moved there from the all-black town of Rentiesville. With a deep concern for young people, she worked to get employment for black youths in local businesses that had not previously employed them. For a time she also served as the national recording secretary of the Colored Women's Clubs and enjoyed a close relationship with one of its presidents, Mary F. Waring, who visited with the Franklins during her visits to the state. Religion also occupies a prominent place in Franklin's work. A church-going man of deep spiritual conviction, he nonetheless had little regard for narrow denominationalism. He saw firsthand how an iron-clad commitment to a particular faith divided the community of Rentiesville, to which he and his family had moved after leaving Ardmore, Oklahoma, where he had practiced law. Although specific circumstances played an important role in his liberalism, Franklin's attitude arose fundamentally from the teachings of his parents, especially his father, who didn't care a hoot for denominations. …

"Love Me Like I Like to Be": The Sexual Politics of Hurston's Their Eyes were Watching God, the Classic Blues, and the Black Women's Club Movement

Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God is a text at once (ac)claimed for its ability to speak to contemporary gender and sexual politics and blamed for its inability to speak to the local, particularized politics of its time. Their Eyes has been used to situate strong, culture-based women at the center of an African American women's literary tradition, on the one hand, and has been read as reinforcing primitivism or as idealizing the folk, on the other.(1) As important as Hurston's critical reception has been, it has mediated against considering her work as politicized in her own historical moment. Just as Claudia Tate notes the invisibility of the politics of early black domestic fiction, I am suggesting that much of the political embeddedness of Hurston's text has been lost. Their Eyes engages in early twentieth-century black feminist politics. To develop a context for the sexual politics of earlier writers, critics and historians have turned to the discourses of the black women's club movement, which had its origins in the antilynching campaign, and the classic blues, sung and written in large part by African American women. Pauline Hopkins and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, in particular, have been read as engaged in the political debates of the black women's club movement, as have Hurston's contemporaries Nella Larsen, Angelina Weld Grimke, and, obliquely, Jessie Fauset (Tate; Carby, Reconstructing; McDowell, 'Nameless' 142).(2) Unaccountably, Hurston has been left out of this investigation, even though Their Eyes clearly took shape within a broad continuum of African American women's writing on sexuality early in this century.(3) Hurston's biography supports such historical contextualization of her work. She worked for Mary McLeod Bethune just before Bethune founded the National Council of Negro Women in 1935 and traveled in the same circles as Alice Dunbar Nelson, an officer in the Federation of Colored Women's Clubs (Hemenway 19; Hull 90, 166). In addition, the discourse of the anti-lynching campaign must have been particularly visible to a student at Howard just before and during the push for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill in 1922.(4) Hurston was also an authority on African American folk music, assisting Alan Lomax in his collecting and recording for the Music Division of the Library of Congress in 1935 (Hemenway 211). Although Hazel Carby has read Hurston as opposed to urban or commercialized versions of the blues (Politics 75), her relationship to them was complex. Hurston was a friend of Ethel Waters, for example, and attempted to sell her a song on at least one occasion (Hemenway 207, 284). On a trip with Langston Hughes, she stayed with Bessie Smith (106) and was quite familiar with Harlem cabarets as well as the Southern tent-show and vaudeville tradition which showcased classic blues singers (26-27). In fact, she once joined a traveling theatrical troupe as a wardrobe girl (17).(5) It is my contention that Hurston has been left out of this debate primarily because her text disrupts neat dichotomies between respectability and desire, middle- and working-class discourses, and club and blues women. Their Eyes alludes to the politics of rape and lynching, as I discuss in detail below, by first charging Janie with sexual misconduct and then by exonerating her, primarily in the trial scene. However, Their Eyes does not reject charges of African American women's libidinousness at the expense of sexual expression, as literary critics have argued of other texts from this period. Critics like Carby and Deborah McDowell have generally read African American women's literature during the Harlem Renaissance as replicating the middle-class conservatism of club discourse and as opposing or suppressing the liberatory sexual discourse of the blues.(6) Hurston's text doesn't fit this critical bifurcation. Historians, too, claim that club and blues discourses existed to some extent in opposition to one another. …

National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, 1895-1992. Part 1: Minutes of the National Conventions, Publications, and President's Office Correspondence, Part 2: President's Office Files, 1958-1968.

National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, 1895-1992. Part 1: Minutes of the National Conventions, Publications, and President's Office Correspondence, Part 2: President's Office Files, 1958-1968.

"If You Can't Push, Pull, If You Can't Pull, Please Get Out of the Way": The Phyllis Wheatley Club and Home in Chicago, 1896 to 1920

In 1978, Gerda Lerner noted that the activities and significance of African-American's women's clubs had not received proper attention from historians.(1) Since that time, the scholarship on African-American women's clubs has increased substantially. Studies have explored individual club women's lives and contributions; social institutions and facilities created by the clubs; collaborative efforts between clubs on the regional, state, and national levels; and African-American women's exclusion from white women's clubs.(2) To date, though, there has not been a thorough analysis, much less chronicling, of African-American women's clubs and their activities in Chicago. Chicago is a critical locus for study as it had one of the largest African-American urban populations in the early twentieth century, due largely to the substantial southern migration there. Chicago was also known for its social reformers and settlement workers, including Jane Addams, Edith Abbott, Mary McDowell, Ida B. Wells, Fannie Barrier Williams, and Mary Waring. Although African-American and white social workers and reformers occasionally worked side by side, more often than not the Chicago settlements and other social institutions were racially segregated. This necessitated the creation and sustenance by African-American women's clubs of community institutions such as settlements, kindergartens, nurseries, youth clubs, homes for the aged, and homes for young girls and women. One such African-American women's club was the Phyllis Wheatley Club. Founded in 1896 by Elizabeth Lindsay Davis, a prominent state and national organizer in the African-American women's club movement, the Phyllis Wheatley Club was one of the oldest African-American women's clubs in Chicago. The original interests of the Club, in conjunction with the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACW), centered on things pertaining to the elevation of home among all women.(3) However, particularly from 1905 to 1918, poverty, segregation and discrimination increased, particularly in the city's Black Belt. To alleviate the dire living and employment conditions which newly-arrived African-American women faced, the Phyllis Wheatley Home was founded by the Club in 1907. It offered wholesome surroundings for colored girls and women who [we]re strangers in the city and to house them until they [found] safe and comfortable quarters.(4) Although frequent references have been made to the Home and Club in the African-American women's club scholarship and in historical studies of Chicago, there has been no complete analysis of either the Club or the Home.(5) This is most likely due to the dearth of primary historical sources available on Chicago's African-American women's clubs.(6) The most useful historical sources have been two Chicago African-American newspapers from this time period, the Broad Ax and the Chicago Defender. Not only did they publish many of the women's clubs annual reports, but also weekly accounts of club meetings, fund-raisers, and other club activities in the society, church, and women's columns. Such accounts, along with editorials and articles written by club women, provide rich contextual information on the Phyllis Wheatley Club and Home. Using such documentation, this article will examine the activities of the Phyllis Wheatley Club, particularly those which focused on the Home. The first section will describe the Club's early activities, goals, and members prior to the creation of the Home. The second section will examine the conditions in Chicago which precipitated the founding of the Home, followed by an analysis of the Home and the Club activities associated with it. THE PHYLLIS WHEATLEY CLUB The Phyllis Wheatley Club was organized in 1896 in accordance with the National Association of Colored Women's (NACW) departments of Home, Education, Domestic Science, Philanthropy, Industry, Literature, Art, Suffrage, and Patriotism. …

The Negro in Periodical Literature, 1985-1989 — Part II

INTELLECTUAL--CULTURAL--SOCIAL Anesko, Michael. So Discreet a Zeal: Slavery and the Anglican Church in Virginia, The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, XCIII (July, 1985), 247-278 A demonstration of the inter-relationship of the Anglican Church in Virginia and practices involving the Negro, 1680-1730. Berthoff, Rowland, Mist Over the South, The Journal of Southern LII (September, 1986), 523-546. The author consistently questions the thesis that the Southern culture is a reflection of English Celtic roots. He reflects on the African survival in the United States, while analyzing the data relative to his theme. pp. 524, 545. Blayney, Michael Stewart, and the Noble Savage, The Tennessee Historical Quarterly, XLV (Spring, 1986), 56-73. An analysis of Roots in an attempt to determine the sources of its popularity. Blight, David W., Frederick Douglass and the American Apocalypse, Civil War XXXI (December, 1985), 309-328. An examination of Douglass's place in the intellectual and theological traditions in the search for the meaning of the American Civil War. Bourgeois, Christie L., Stepping Over Lines: Lyndon Johnson, Black Texans, and the National Youth Administration, 1935-1937, Southwestern Historical Quarterly, XCI (October, 1987) 149-172. Reference to J.J. Rhodes and Bishop College, 157, 158. Brady, Marilyn Dell, Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, 1900-1930, Kansas History A Journal of the Central Plains, IX (Spring, 1986), 19-30. The story reflecting the organization, work and development of the Kansas Federation of Colored Women's Clubs from 1900. Burnside, Jacqueline G., Suspicion Versus Faith: Negro Criticism of Berea College in the Nineteenth Century, The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, LXXXIII (Summer, 1985), 237-266. The article concentrates on the formative period, the mid-1890's, when Berea began experiencing a rapid rate of growth and the evolving conflict in an unusual experience in racial co-education in the South. Butler, Anne M., Still in Chains: Black Women in Western Prisons, 1865-1910, Western Historical Quarterly, XX (February, 1989), 19-35. The article focuses, with only limited comparative pretenses, on the experiences of black women in Western prisons. Carlton-LaNey, Iris, Social Work Students' Emergency Relief Work Following the East Nashville Fire of 1916, Tennessee Historical Quarterly , XLIV (Winter, 1985), 371-379. A study reflecting the varied actions of Fisk University Social Work students after the Nashville Fire of 1916. Chambers, Clarke A., Toward a Redefinition of Welfare History, The Journal of American LXIII (September, 1986), 407-433. An analysis urging an expansion and redefinition of the field of welfare history and an attempt to point up the necessity for closer co-ordination with the new social history-blacks involved. Chapman, Gregory Dean, Army Life at Camp Thomas, Georgia, During the Spanish American War, The Georgia Historical Quarterly, LXX (Winter, 1986), 633-656. Black military unit cited in a review of military experiences at Camp Thomas, Georgia during the Spanish American War and the following years. Blacks cited, 637, 638, 639. Chiswick, Barry R., Differences in Education and Earnings Across Racial and Ethnic Groups: Tastes, Discrimination, and Investments in Child Quality, Quarterly Journal of Economics, CIII (August, 1988), 571-595. A demonstration that group differences in earnings, schooling and rates of return from schooling, are striking, higher levels of schooling-higher rates of return which coincides with child quality investment, rejecting determinants of schooling are discrimination, minority group status. Clement, Priscilla Ferguson, Children and Charity: Orphanages in New Orleans, 1817-1914, Louisiana XXVII (Fall, 1986), 337-351. …

Perspectives on Our National Experience: Race, Class, and Gender

On April 18, 1989, Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) held its First Annual Provost's Mini-Symposium, titled Perspectives on Our National Experience: Race, Class, and Gender. Examining the role of color, class, and sexual difference in American society over more than a century, the one-day conference not only sought to highlight the distinct impact of these forces, but more importantly their interaction. Appropriately, the conference presenters represented an interdiscipli nary roster of scholars from history, political science, economics, and black and women's studies. While the conference was indeed a success, a close examination of the various papers and the mini format reveals certain limitations. Focusing on the black experience, historians John Bracey (University of Massachusetts at Amherst) and William Chaffe (Duke University) set the histori cal backdrop and much of the tone for the remaining papers. Bracey analyzed the black experience from the 1880s through 1915. Describing the period as the nadir in African-American history, he discussed the fall of Reconstruction, the massive reversal of black enfranchisement, the intensification of legal and extra legal forms of racial intimidation such as lynchings, increasing entrapment of blacks within the sharecropping, convict-lease, and debt-peonage systems, and growing constraints on the creation of a black artisan class. While the experiences of black men and women, elites and workers, were constrained by the foregoing dynamics of class and race, Bracey argued that there were important differences along gender and to some extent class lines. When black women formed the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs in the